A federal judge has thwarted a last-gasp attempt by former President Donald Trump to block House investigators from obtaining documents related to his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
According to Politico, Trump filed an emergency request late Monday night to prevent the National Archives from sending sensitive records to Jan. 6 committee investigators by Friday. Just after midnight, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected it saying the request itself was legally “defective.”
The decision comes as Chutkan is already considering an earlier request by Trump to prevent Congress from peering into his White House’s records about his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump last month sued to block the National Archives from turning the records over after President Joe Biden declined to assert executive privilege on his behalf. The Archives indicated it would turn the papers over to lawmakers by Friday, unless a court intervened.
Chutkan heard arguments in the suit last week and promised to rule quickly on Trump’s initial emergency request. But she seemed inclined to reject it, questioning the legal basis for a former president to claim executive privilege over records when the sitting president and Congress disagree.
As previously reported by the Daily Boulder, Trump is seeking to block the National Archives from turning over at least 750 pages out of an initial 1,500 unearthed in response to the Jan. 6 committee’s request for records about the former president’s effort to overturn the election. As noted by Politico, “many of those papers are culled from the files of senior Trump aides like Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller and Patrick Philbin. They also include call and visitor logs.”
